A Definitive Guide to Raiding

A Definitive Guide to Tyrant Raids:

Raids are a new group PvE experience on Tyrant that allows a group of individuals the chance to fight a specialized opponent that is stronger than the single player experience. Cooperation is key as you are required to work together to take down a “boss” that requires dozens, hundreds, or thousands of attacks to defeat. I’ve compiled this information together in order to hopefully answer any question that anyone not acquainted with raiding might have.

How to Initiate a Raid:
A raid can be started by a single player by going to the Faction tab and the Enter button of the raid. When you start the raid you will be charged 25 energy. Be warned that besides Arcantis all the raids require a significantly sized group of players willing to spend quite a bit of time on the endeavor. Also, when you create a raid you are not able to create another raid during both the period the raid is active AND during its cool down period.

How to Invite Others:
Inviting your friends and faction members is very easy. Inside the raid there is a button in the bottom right hand corner of the screen that says “Request Backup.” Clicking this button brings up a popup that has both a link and a button that states “Post to Faction.” You can send the link to your friends, post it in the forums or chat, or click the “Post to Faction” button to have an invite button posted in the Info section of your Faction.

How to Join a Raid:
Luckily there are lots of people starting raids so you will not be limited in your choices. Once again, if you are thinking about joining a raid please read the descriptions below and make sure you are willing to invest that much energy to the raid so as not to be a drain on the raid. To join you can click on an invite link in the forum, chat, or Info button of your faction. If for some reason the link does not work for you please copy and paste the link into your web browser. That’s it, you’re in.

How Raids Work:
Raids combine the collective attacks of all the players against the raid “boss” much like a war between factions, but instead of comparing two different scores each raid has a certain amount of health that must be defeated inside of a time period that begins when the raid does. Damage points are accumulated for each win and you get between 15-25 points per successful attack. It seems to closely follow the formula for war points.

After defeating a boss you must go back to view the raid within 24 hours and click the “Claim Rewards” button, if you do not collect your rewards in time they are lost. Also, after each attempt at a raid each player is given a cool down before another attempt that varies based upon the raid.

Honor and Getting Cards:
There is a new section of the Store → Rewards → Raid cards. Here you can find 11 new cards that available after achieving a certain amount of faction with its raid. Honor is gained based upon a tier system that rewards each player for helping the group achieve its goal. Here is a listing of the point value tiers and their associated honor gains (Thank you, Noth):

So the only way to get 20 Honor on Arctis Vanguard Raid is to solo it and not be unlucky enough to hit exactly 400 points.

After achieving the required amount of honor for each card you may purchase the cards with gold. Each card may be purchased multiple times just like reputation rewards. Here is a list of the reward cards:

Arctis Vanguard:

(20 Honor/250 Gold) Unfortunately Safeguards 2CD drops it from a great card to mediocre. The one caveat is that it is easy for a low level to get this card by themselves and use themselves and use it instead of Sawblade rush, but this is not recommended as Sawblades are superior for mission grinding.

Xeno Walker:

(100 Honor/12000 Gold)
While it does give Xeno another quick siege unit, Ixnedrone is considered mediocre by a large part of the community.

Siege on Kor

Requires 100 Honor to unlock and 12,000 Gold to buy
Gatling tower is going to change a lot of defense decks. Expect this Strike/Jam/Weaken to be used in Draco decks instead of Tesla Towers.

Imperial Purger

(100 Honor/12,000 Gold) Remote Analyzer might be useful in certain weaken defense decks or combined with Nimbus or if the meta changes to have more Flying defense decks.

(500 Honor/15,000 Gold) Hellion is a card that is generating a lot of interest. It seems comparable in strength to Stealthy Niaq while having the advantage of not being unique, but would be a lot stronger if Imperial had access to better rally cards. Look for offensive meta to include this card soon.

Enclave Flagship:

(100 Honor/12,000 Gold) Sustainer Xolan seemed like a very intriguing defense card, but seems to be somewhat of a let down. The inability to deal quick damage to the opponents deck seems to work poorly in the current meta environment.

(500 Honor/15,000 Gold) Azure Reaper is one of the most sought after raid cards. It’s combination of High health, evade and flying can be strong against enemies that lack anti-air.

Oluth:

(100 Honor/12,000 Gold) I see a lot of potential for Toxic Cannon if the meta moves away from strikes. I doubt this will happen soon though.

(500 Honor/15,000 Gold) Carrion Retriever is a little slow but some are attempting to use it in regeneration based defensive decks. I feel that the cards to make it effective are not there though.

Tartarus Swarm:

(100 Honor/12,000 Gold) Yet another weaker version of EMP. EMP can’t be improved upon so they try to make utility version of it.

(500 Honor/15,000 Gold) Big, slow, and with more leech than it can use without an outside source or rally. Some think it can make a slowroll BT deck work.

The below was contributed by Shadowhopeful
The content is unchanged from what was sent to me except for some formatting.

(800 Honor/15000 Gold)
A 3 turn warm up makes this useless for rushes, but for Slowroll, it’s very different. This card is great for keeping your units alive, and can help against a wall stall. This issue here is, like Ixnedrone, the price. 15k for a single card that has limited use cripples its value.
Rating 5/10

(800 Honor/15000 Gold)
A fear card. For Raider.
Like Safeguard, Concussive Guard’s usefulness is highly reduced by it’s 2 cooldown. And it’s overpriced. The only thing good about this card it “Rally 2”, but you would be better off using a different card.
Rating: 2/10

(1000 Honor/15000 Gold)
Enforcer mech looks promising as a slowroll card. Healing + Jam + Immobilise is a very appealing combination, especially if combined with rally, and with high health and hp, this is worth getting.
Rating: 8/10

(1000 Honor/15000 Gold)
At a first glance, Vanquisher looks like a good card to use, especially in a Xeno Slowroll. But look again. Pierce is not the most respectable skill to hold, and even though it has its uses, I hold doubts as to the usability of this card compared to equivalents like Titan.
Rating: 6/10

Take Blight Tower, Pump it up a bit, turn it into an action card, and make it discriminate BT instead of Imperial. Alliance specific cards are not the best to use, especially as you can substitute cards like EMP, Pandemic, or Destruction. Overall, not a good card.
Rating: 4/10

That card looks awesome. Because it is. Weaken All 1 with only 1 turn warm up is incredibly useful, and evade and immobilise makes it a hard card to kill. especially if you put it down AFTER your first card. However, 2 hp makes it heavily susceptible to EMP and the like, especially counter. Best used as a flanker.
Rating: 7/10

Thanks for the info Shadowhopeful

Over the next few posts I detail the different raids. Keep in mind that I do not give a definitive card list because the raids have a pool of cards that it gets the cards from and the cards change over time in order to increase the difficulty of the raid.

Individual Raid Information

Arctis Vanguard

Members: up to 5
Damage required for victory: 400
Difficulty: Pitiful
Comprised of incredibly weak cards and requires very little energy to beat. If you’re a completionist then feel free to solo this raid and auto-attack it with any decent deck and expect to spend roughly 200 energy. If you’re not a completionist then feel free to completely ignore Arctis Vanguard.

Xeno Walker

Observations: Xeno Walker doesn’t have the fine edged viciousness of some of the other raids, but what it lacks in terms of incredibly overpowered cards like Core and Cannon Wall it compensates for in terms of sheer annoyance through plentiful Jam and Mimic. Each player is expected to be able to contribute 400 points to the raid which translates to roughly 200 to 250 energy. XW makes a great first raid as it is not too difficult and also is not very time intensive either.

New Ability: None

New Cards:

The deck also has version a version of Ixnedrone with +1 damage/health and Sustaining Xolans with +1 health.

Strategy: This is definitely not the place for Bolide Walkers, Xeno Motherships, or any long cooldown assault units with strong activated abilities as it’s more likely that the boss will use it more often than you will. I recommend strong cards that have few if any activated abilities. Once again a Xeno slowroll sans Mothership can do very well here if you stock up on Daemons, Interceptors, and Hatchlings.

XW is also relatively Evade and Siege free compared to the other raids and gives you a great opportunity to use EMPs and structures. XW is fun in that it needs less specialized cards to defeat it and players have more options to diversify their decks.

Siege of Kor

Difficulty: While easy compared to many other raids, SoK requires a large number of people and access to a decent card selection. With a full raid an average of roughly 470 points per person is required. Since your win rate should be around 90% I would suggest committing using 3 bars of energy before entering the raid.

New Ability:Repair – a heal that works on structures instead of assault cards

New Cards:

Definitely one of the weaker commanders, but he limits structure usage when combined with the Cannon Walkers that sometimes appear in his deck.

Combined with Hubbard’s heal, the armor of Mammoth Tank can be quite a challenge. An early Havoc or another pierce unit combined with rally or strike can help tremendously.

Cannon Wall is the big bad of SoK. If it activates your odds of victory are greatly reduced. Lots of siege or tons of offensive power are necessary to clear this as soon as it hits the board.

The Engineer not only acts like a big wall, but if placed before a Cannon Walker or other weak offensive card and not removed from play it can sabotage your efforts to destroy Cannon Walls before they activate.

Duncan, Invasion Coordinator, or an early siege unit can be very helpful here. I’ve rarely lost a unit to this card, but it can take out one of your big hitters quite easily.

This is a modified version of the raid reward card. Not as devastating as the Cannon Wall, but can be annoying for decks as it can dilute your siege or be indestructible if you are not running siege.

Strategy: Siege on Kor requires, as the name suggests, quite a bit of siege cards to defeat. It is possible to defeat the deck through pure offensive power with Xeno slowroll as most of the structures are walls, but the deck modifies to include some big health beef shields and the ability to destroy structures through them can be very helpful.

Quite a few cards can really shine in Siege of Kor. Duncan, Cannon Walkers, Hydras, Chronos, Lodestar, Havoc, and Omega all shine. Siege, heal, and pierce should be prioritized in card selection. It bears repeating that pierce on an early placed unit or enough strike or rally to break through Mammoth Tanks 2 armor is necessary for victory.

Compared to the amount of dangerous cards in the deck Engineers don’t look like priority targets, but you need to clear them from the board within a turn or two after activation. Any longer than that and you will not be able to take down a Cannon Wall before it activates and destroys your assault units.

Overall, SoK is an easy raid that just requires some deck preparation and good leadership skills to coordinate a large number of people.

The Imperial Purger article was written by svjchtr. Thank you for your time and help, svj.

Imperial Purger

Members: up to 15
Duration: 48 hours
Points needed to win: 9000
Cool Down: 58 hours
Unlocked after completion of Mission 48
Difficulty: easy to reach 9000 damage in two days if you have decks that work, but may be difficult for many to build decks that work for this raid.

My observations on the Imperial Purger raid:

The basic idea behind the enemy deck is high quality Imperial units.
The most common abilities on the cards seem to be Armor and Flurry.

GDR Gatling Gun: 2/8, 4 Delay. Armor 2, Strike 2, Immobilize. Can be difficult to kill due to the high HP, healing, and armor, and it’ll ruin your life once it starts attacking.

GDR Infantry: 2/3, 1 delay. Armor 1, Flurry 1. Most frustrating 1 delay card I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing. This shows up in multiples fairly often, so I think it’s weighted in the “random” deck selection to show up more often.

GDR Battle Suit: 2/5, delay 2. Armor 2, Siege 2, Antiair 2. As with the infantry, this occasionally shows up in multiples, so you NEED to make sure your deck is equipped to handle this thing.

GDR Core (structure): 6 Delay, Backlash 10, Strike All 4. Backlash 10 means that it deals 10 damage to the enemy commander when the building dies. The single most important card in this raid. I think it ends up
in the deck no matter what, and if you don’t get your siege cards online this thing WILL wreck you.

There are two aspects of the enemy deck that need to be addressed. The first is the speed of the deck. The GDR Infantry/Battle Suit, Arc Trooper, etc etc will eat you alive if your hand is too slow. The second is the GDR Core. If you don’t win before the structure activates (and it’s fairly safe to assume that you usually won’t, as
you’ll be backpedaling against the enemy assault cards), you either need to siege it out or click “OK” on the DEFEAT window. It sucks to play siege cards to answer the GDR Core, as it’s more or less the only
relevant building, but hey, it’s better than losing.

Some cards that are good for this raid:

Sabre – pierces armor, and strike’s good for containing the units. A little fragile but great if it survives.

Havoc – very strong if it survives until it starts attacking

Bolide Walker (combined with Yurich, preferably) – combined with EMP, a Bolide Walker activation will clearly nearly all of the opposing assault cards, and is equivalent to an instant win if you don’t get wiped by GDR Core.

Titan – a little worse than Bolide Walker but still good. You’ll want heal to keep this alive.

Enclave Flagship

Members: Up to 25
Duration: 24 Hours.
Damage Required for Victory: 10,000
Cool Down: 32 Hours
Difficulty: Challenging. EF has a super Draco commander paired with Evade and Strike structures combined with a wall of flying Xeno strong assault cards that commonly have Evade and Mimic. In a full raid the average member needs to contribute 400 points for victory and the win ratio is much lower than such SoK. As such, one should commit to using 400 energy at MINIMUM before joining an EF raid.

New Ability: None

New Cards:

Other common cards: Dominated Hatchlings, Xeno Interceptor, Xeno Mothership, Phoenix, Death From Above, Ghost and Rifter.

Strategy: EF is very challenging as you’re running into lots of 4-5 health fliers while Kaszatah makes most good and fast anti-air or siege cards useless. Daemon is your friend here as it still has the ability to 1-2 shot almost everything in the deck without rallies. Battlestation is the most annoying single card in the deck as it is not a wall and has evade and high health. It’s been joked around that if he starts out by playing 2 of them to start the game you should save yourself some frustration and concede the match. While it is beatable, it’s hard to fight it as most good siege units have low attack or high cool down times and either get smothered by the assault cards or batter at them uselessly.

Prioritize assault cards based upon Anti-Air (3+ damage only), healing, and siege. Some people recommend Valkyries, but I find that the high amount of Evade and Mimic makes strike far less effective than healing. I would personally run 5x Daemons and 5x Xeno Champions, if I have the cards, but as of this writing I haven’t made a deck with better than an 75% win ratio. Any helpful deck ideas would be appreciated and quoted here.

Oluth

Members: up to 20
Duration 6 Hours
Points needed to win: 4000
Cool Down: 27 hours
Unlocked after completion of Mission 66
Difficulty: Very Easy. Oluth requires the second least amount of points and last a maximum of 6 hours combined with a very easy raid deck. While you can have a maximum of 20 players attacking the boss, a dedicated 5 man group could complete the mission within the time frame.

Strategy While Oluth is a healing commander controlling a large force of great regenerating units, it feels like the younger, weaker, and annoying little brother of TS, and less like a real raid. Any slowroll deck will, pardon the phrasing, roll over Oluth if slowly because of regernation. The only real concern is an early Blood Pool activating, I recommend that you place in a couple Healing/Seige units such as Xeno Champions or Poseidon and a Full Power it comes out early. The 3 CD on Blood Pool means you’ll have time to play one siege and the Full Power almost every time.

If anyone is having problems with Oluth please let me know and I will expand on this section, but the Xeno Slowroll deck I used without modification for this raid went 20 for 20 while doing the raid. In case anyone is wondering it was a very generic deck Vyander, 2x Daemon, 2x Xeno Champs, Rifter, Tiamat, Predator, 2x Dominated Hatchlings, Full Power.

Tartarus Swarm

Members: up to 100
Duration: 72 Hours
Points needed to win: 90,000
Cool Down: ???
Difficulty: Moderate to Difficult. An average speed or slowroll deck will be quickly crushed, but a properly built deck with easy to get cards make the minimizes the challenge of TS.

Observations: Tartarus Swarm is the epitome of BT rush. It’s fast, furious, heavily aggressive with rarely any healing, rally intensive, and has just enough big guys thrown in to put a speed bump in an opponents rush deck. It’s made far worse than normal by the new ability Split which I go into below. TS allows a massive 100 members to join in the fight, but this is paled by the fact it requires 100,000 points which is three times more than KoS and ten times EF’ victory requirements. With a full raid each player would need to supply 1,000 points over a two day period. DO NOT join a TS raid unless you will have several chances over the next few days to log in and remember that you will need to invest roughly 500 to 600 energy to pull your own weight.

New Ability: Split – Every active card with split creates a copy of the card at the end of the assault line. Each copy acts as a full version of the card in that it can itself split into another card when activated. This means that if unchecked the card will make new cards at an exponential rate. I’m not sure if this is a bug or the design intent, but currently if a Carrion Retriever splits, it creates a Spawn instead of a Carrion Retriever.

Strategy
Tartarus Swarm is a raid that you have to get on top of and stay on top of right out of the gate as it’s capable of playing 1 wait assault cards that, if not instantly killed, can easily make the game out of your reach in the first few turns. While at the same time it tends to place enough larger cards in the deck to give you pause for fast rush and carries both a commander with weaken and assault cards with Strike All.

My rule of thumb for building a deck for TS was the 3 damage rule. A large number of the cards in the deck had to be capable of killing a Spawn the turn after it was played with the help of the commander. The cards that fit this rule are Tiamat, Predator, Irradiated Infantry, Piranha, Blood Grunts and Hunter. All of these have 1 wait and are capable of putting 3 damage on the board before a Spawn can split. (For those interested Poison does take effect before healing and Split). I would recommend going with more Irradiated than Blood Grunts as the deck can use Acid Splash which is very detrimental to the grunts, but I also used several as it made me score more points per attack. Combine this with crowd control such as Omega, EMPs, and Airstrikes and add one large damage dealer to quickly end the fight once you have control of the situation. Mawcor works very well for this.

Obviously, any small rush deck won’t score many points in either wars or in raids. I know some people are working on different variants that score better and will add more information as theorycrafting develops. Also, if you have any good ideas, please post them below. I’d also suggest putting in a large attacker such as Merciless Invader and place it after you have a few fast attackers out in order to get higher point possibilities.

Afterword Thank you for all your comments, criticism, and praise. If there needs to be an changes, fixes, or anything that needs to be refined please let me know. I now consider the guide complete except for minor updates and changes.

The idea is using a lot of weaken all (i use 4x sand crawler) + draconnex
2 healer (aegis, poseidon)
kraken (the 10 health anti air raider should be perfect, think is name is gun raven but not sure because I haven’t got this card)
daemon (as many as possible)
merciles invaders (or others high attack cards)

You have to put daemon, sand crawler and kraken at the begin with the healers (2 “defense card” for 1 healer) and finish with merciles invaders.

Healers + weaken all 1 (drac + sand crawler) make the game during long time, the aim is to give you time for high attack to get their commander down

I’ve found that a xeno muscle deck works fairly well if you lead off with cards that can’t be mimic’d. I have an 80% winrate leading with Xeno Interceptor in the following deck:

(I have no Daemons but if I had them I would run them for sure)
Vyander
2x Xeno Interceptor
1x Apex
1x Xeno Mothership
1x Dominated Hatchling
1x Phoenix
1x EMP
1x Enclave Pylon
[Filler]:
1x Gravity Tank
1x Hypastryx

I have 4 Daemons, and I’m getting my fuckin’ ass kicked. The Xeno walker jams one, then mimics the jam of another, then a mind controller mimics the jam of the third. And then a strucure comes out which jams a fourth, and then the fucking lightning cannon with a drop of 2 and a HEALTH OF 8 jams another!

i’m getting my fucking ass kicked.

And to that guy who advocated 4x Hatchets and 4X asylums, I’ve won maybe 1 out of 8 battles. So y’know…. good, tried and true strategy there.

For enclave flagship: Vyander with 5 Daemons, 3 Enclave Champions, Stealthy Niaq, and Xeno Mothership. This deck wins near 100% of the time. It doesn’t require a whole lot of skill either; lead with a Daemon or two and from there it doesn’t matter too much what you play.

What makes this so successful is that Daemon can kill the assault units easily, the Champions provide plenty of healing and siege (for those annoying structures), and the Daemons/Niaq give you jam galore to help with any enemy units that actually get out. The Xeno Mothership could be replaced if you really wanted, but the rally all xeno 1 helps speed things up and keep you ahead.

I found that using a flurry deck against XW: Sidoze; 2 Fury Walkers, 2 Scropinox, Airstrike, Missile Silo, Havoc and Jet Trooper (for heals) Works well with 2 Spots remainging can make light work of XW however if flurry cards arent spammed it can eb very hit and miss, i recommend keeping the two spots for a Mawcor or some other Fury Walkers. as they can rally and Flurry…

I mixed together all heavy strike structures and high hp units with non mimicable abilities I could find.
I guess you can change a lot in this deck, but the idea behind the decks seems to work well, especially, because the enemy often wastes his Death from above in the first few turns, where you most of the time won’t even have a unit out and becaus his structures are useless most of the time.

I found that using a flurry deck against XW: Sidoze; 2 Fury Walkers, 2 Scropinox, Airstrike, Missile Silo, Havoc and Jet Trooper (for heals) Works well with 2 Spots remainging can make light work of XW however if flurry cards arent spammed it can eb very hit and miss, i recommend keeping the two spots for a Mawcor or some other Fury Walkers. as they can rally and Flurry…

Have you tried this? The XW deck is heavy with flying, high defense cards and you have NO anti-air in there at all.

I tried a variant of this deck, only with chaos wave instead of airstrike, and I got hammered. The computer deployed flyers to block my fury walkers, the Missile Silo didn’t have enough juice to strike those 7-health fighters down, so I got killed.

Thanks for all the feedback and deck suggestions guys. I’m going to pass out as it was a long night writing that text wall down. When I get up I’ll make sure to do some more editing and get some peer suggestions inserted in the original post.

Something to note would be that you can see when you unlock the raids from the missions pages. I just unlocked siege on kor by finishing mission 42 once. Was my third raid to be unlocked. I can see the ‘R’ for the raid on that mission map, and can see that only today that I’ve unlocked that raid on the raid page.

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